It was the kind of bright spring day that shouts “let’s go out to the ballgame!” when I met up with Pete Walker and his old teammate Marty Doney. We were standing on the edge of an expansive field across the road from the sprawl of old industrial buildings built by Peoples Natural Gas in 1907, now owned and operated by Anderson Fittings. On the far side of the field, a row of houses rim the hill where the streets of Brave crisscross before heading out of town on Kuhntown Road.
I came to write about Brave, a town of many names with a story behind each one. Pete and Marty came to tell me about fast pitch softball and the teams that nearly every town, village and church in Greene County once had. Teams were made up of churchgoers or working men sponsored by their bosses and the annual tournament held in Brave went on for weeks as June slid into July. It was standing room only or bring a chair, as teams from miles and states around came to pitch, bat, and home run their way to the top prize and bragging rights for the year.
“See that little white building? That’s the concession stand. And the grade school used to sit right up there.” Pete pointed off to the right of the houses.
Farmers stopped putting up hay to watch the games that were played every day and into the night –Brave was one of the few fields that had lights – until one team was left standing. Pete was a star pitcher, arguably the best around and was fast enough to play professionally in a sport that has all but disappeared as a men’s game. But it found new life with women’s college teams, the Olympics, and as a professional sport. High school teams attract college recruitment, with scholarships for star players, and winning teams have their followers on sports TV.
Pete got his start playing for Fairall Church near his family’s farm. Kids played after church and after chores in every flat pasture they could find when he was growing up in the 1950s. He remembers seeing his first windmill side arm pitcher strike out every batter who came up.
“My dad brought me to Brave to see the tournament I was maybe 13 and I said ‘Wow! I want to pitch like those guys!’ So I went home, nailed a bushel basket to the side of the chicken coop and started practicing until I could get the ball to do what I wanted.”
We drove over to find home plate still glistening in the grass and Matt Cumberledge, director of the Greene County Historical Society Museum joined us. Matt had come to show me some of the even older days when his relatives first settled Dunkard Creek. We would drive a mile west of town on Toms Run Road to find the site of the massacre that almost eliminated the Cumberledge family tree in Greene County. There at the confluence of the Pennsylvania and West Virginia forks of Dunkard Creek, we took Mine Road and headed into West Virginia, to the place where Cumberledges and Wileys first settled the land.
Matt pointed to the little building sitting on a knoll on what was once the A.J. Cumberledge homestead. “That used to be the Brave Post Office.”
G. Wayne Smith’s Post Offices of Greene County explains how the name Brave got moved around. The first settlement that grew up where Hoovers Run joins with Dunkard Creek in the late 18th century was known as Kent’s Mill, later shortened to Kent. In 1860 the growing village was awarded a post office but a misspelling in Caldwell’s Atlas of 1876 changed its name to Dent. Postmasters were a patronage position depending on the political party in office, so when longtime Dent postmaster John F. Coen lost his job after the elections of 1890, Mary Coen applied for a post office permit a mile up the road and submitted possible names: Coen, Brave, Hope and Nell. Her request came back with three crossed off and speculation has it that Brave was the name of the family dog.
When patronage changed again in 1894, Johh Coen got back his old job, moved the Brave post office to Dent, closed the Dent post office and the town of Brave was born.
Mine Road follows the railroad tracks past a cluster of farms into a forgotten valley surrounded by steep wooded hills. Dunkard Creek was rerouted by the railroad to accommodate the tracks, turning a captured twist of stream into a sparkling body of water with a pavilion and dock for fishing. First built for mine workers, it is now a hidden treasure for those who know how to find it. This is where two cemeteries full of Matt’s relatives are tucked against the hill. The Cumberledge cemetery stones peek out from the branches of a fallen tree from a winter of ice and wind storms and Matt groaned then grinned – just another project for the kid who learned to love family history enough to become the county museum director and family artifact custodian, all in one.
We followed the road and the tracks past the pavilion and hiked up to the Wiley Cemetery to enjoy the view. Somewhere in these hills or along this bottom “a party of Indians murdered, on the headwaters of Dunkard Creek, Washington County” William Thomas, Joseph and Alice Cumberledge and their two children on April 25, 1789. The horrific event was reported in the May 9 issue of the Pittsburgh Gazette and the resulting public furor caused the Governor of Virginia to send troops to the frontier to help drive skirmishes into Ohio where the Battle of Fallen Timber brought an end to a bloody era.
Where the bodies were buried is lost to time, but in 1802, Joseph’s son George, who had stayed behind in Maryland when the family moved here, came to settle on his father’s land. “George had 14 kids and the youngest, Daniel, is my fourth great grandfather,” Matt told me. Daniel married Sarah Wiley, the girl from the farm next door, in the early 1830s, lived a full life, but was also buried in an unmarked grave. Fortunately for posterity, Daniel’s grandson Bert Gump who was born in 1892 still remembered his mother taking him to see his grandfather’s grave and Matt remembers talking about it to “Old Bert” as a kid. “That’s how we knew where it was and put a headstone on it.”
The history of Brave is inexorably tied to people Matt is related to. Peoples Natural Gas came to town in 1905 and by 1907 had built the worlds biggest compressor station to pump gas out of Greene County through pipelines to Pittsburgh, 26 million cubic feet a day. There would be plenty of good paying jobs for everyone who wanted to work for the next 50 years. But bad times came with the good – on April 13, 1917 the company’s gasoline manufacturing plant was destroyed in an explosion that was heard in Waynesburg, 15 miles away.
Of the six men killed, two were Cumberledges, as were two of the five seriously injured.
When new, bigger pipelines changed routes and made Brave Compressor Station obsolete, the jobs left town and era of company sponsored fast pitch softball teams and tournaments came to an end.
Brave is now a bedroom community for those who work elsewhere and a final destination for those who can’t imagine leaving this place.
And Dunkard Creek continues to flow past the old compressor station that now makes brass fittings and families still come from miles around to swim and fish the big cement lined pool in the stream that once cooled the pipes of the station when it was in full production and Brave was a company town.
Your article brings back many memories of growing up and going to school in and around Brave. Thank you very much.